Friday, July 31, 2009

Anyone knows about Twitter CTRs?

I’ve been running an experiment with four twitter profiles to find out what a good click through rate (CTR) is on Twitter. What I found out was kind of shocking and amazing: Twitter seems to have a 4% clickthrough rate. No wonder the affiliate marketers, spammers and get rich quick crowd are flocking to it. 4% CTR is outstanding in any internet advertising program:

Methodology: I set up unique short URL trackers on seperate domains and then conversed and posted links and retweets though the shorty tracker for four different profiles. After on month, I tabulated the results to find the aggregate click through rate.

What’s it Mean?1. People click on twitter links more than pay per click ads and banner ads.2. CTR on Twitter seems to scale with larger groups of followers.3. The larger your follower base is the more people will click on links your post.

Working with about 140 responses who collectively have 333,000 folllowers, I found that the average clickthrough rate was 1.7%. The trend of more followers equaling a lower click through rate has definitely held true, though. For those respondents with more than 5000 followers, the click through rate is a mere 0.9%. For those with less than 5000 followers, it’s 3.5%. For those with less than 1000 followers, it’s 6%. This scatter graph hopefully illustrates that trend. That’s followers on the x-axis, and CTRs on the y-axis. To make the diagram more readable, I excluded a couple of the really big follower counts (click for the largess):

***

(Bold mine)

It's really still too early to tell what is the CTR like for brands to be on Twitter. What I know, personally from my own social experiment is, Sparks is getting more traffic from Twitter (createsparks). And these traffic are 'repeat visits'. Therefore, you'd expect your followers to be some kind of 'brand loyalist' (to a certain extent because they care enough to want to know what you have to say). But still. I think it's still a rather vague question whether our clients should be on Twitter. I think brands need to be convinced in another way, at least over here in Malaysia. What's more important is the 'sustainability' of this channel. No, I'm not referring to Twitter. They're probably gonna be around for awhile. But the 'sustainability' of the resource invested on this channel. You can't have createsparks one day and gone the next day, can you? So think it through before you decide to be on social media. And someone rightly put it. Brands on social media is like Friends with Benefits ;) It's tricky, rewarding, exciting, scary - all in one. Hmm. We likes.